Windows Phone 7 will get many important new features in an update codenamed "Mango" later this year, Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Phone program management, said at Microsoft's MIX11 developer event today.

Skype, Spotify, and Angry Birds will all come to the platform within the next few months, Belfiore said. Angry Birds will arrive on May 25, with the other two programs dependent on the Mango update.

Belfiore gave more details on Windows Phone multitasking, showed extensions to the app list and "live tile" home screen interfaces, bragged about the speed of the new IE9 browser and apologized for the somewhat rocky experience Windows Phone owners have had with updates so far.

By far the biggest new feature is multitasking. Microsoft first announced that multitasking was coming during February's Mobile World Congress, but today, Belfiore gave more details. Windows Phone won't allow apps to arbitrarily run in the background, because that could eat up too much battery, he said. Instead, apps will be allowed to call "background agents," which will have less latitude to run freely when a phone is on 3G or battery power, and more when a phone is plugged in or on Wi-Fi.

The Mango update will also support playing music in the backgroundboth from the Web and from native appsalong with apps setting alarms and completing file downloads in the background.

The Windows Phone app list is also getting a revamp, to reflect the booming number of Windows Phone appsBelfiore said the catalog is almost up to 13,000 so far. If you have many apps loaded, the main scrolling list will arrange itself in alphabetical groups and will let you quickly jump to any letter within the group, like you can with your contact list. Third-party apps will also be able to pop up more flexibly in searches and in the music/video hub on the phone, making them more visible.

Mango will include Internet Explorer 9, which is much faster than Microsoft's earlier browser and those used on Android and iPhone phones, Belfiore said. The phone version of IE9 uses the same engine as the desktop version. Belfiore showed a demo of an animated, HTML5 Web page where a Windows Phone was able to achieve 26 frames per second. A Google Nexus S running Android got 11, and an iPhone 4 only got 2. The browser now works fully in both portrait and landscape modes.

There are a bunch of other speed optimizations, Belfiore and Microsoft corporate vice president Scott Guthrie said, including faster scrolling, a more responsive UI, and much faster image loading.

Mango will also spread Windows Phone further across the world. The update will include 16 new languages and boost the number of countries where people can buy Windows Phone apps to 35, Belfiore said. In a brief appearance, Nokia's head of developer relations, Marco Argenti, hinted that as Nokia gets more involved in the Windows Phone platform, the number of countries supported will tilt sharply upwards.

All of this will be dependent on an over-the-air update, though, and Microsot has had some problems with updates of late. The company's first update crashed some Samsung phones, and it has rolled out slowly and unevenly around the world.

Belfiore defended Microsoft's practice of letting wireless carriers test updates for as long as they want, even if it makes for an uneven update experience as some operators approve the update before others.

"Mobile operators have a very real and resonable interest in testing updates and making sure they're going to work well," he said. Microsoft has found a process where Microsoft, the handset manufacturers, and the mobile operators all get a day "hard to coordinate," he said, "but we expect that we're going to get these problems licked."

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
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